Competition in depleting resource environments shapes the thermal response of population fitness in a disease vector
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Huxley, Paul
Murray, Kris
Pawar, Samraat
Cator, Lauren
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Mathematical models that incorporate the temperature dependence of lab-measured life history traits are increasingly used to predict how climatic warming will affect ectotherms, including disease vectors and other arthropods. These temperature-trait relationships are typically measured under laboratory conditions that ignore how conspecific competition in depleting resource environments—a commonly occurring scenario in nature—regulates natural populations. Here, we used laboratory experiments on the mosquito Aedes aegypti, combined with a stage-structured population model, to show that intensified larval competition in ecologically-realistic depleting resource environments can significantly diminish the vector’s maximal population-level fitness across the entire temperature range, cause a 6°C decrease in the optimal temperature for fitness, and contract its thermal niche width by 10°C. Our results provide evidence for future studies to consider competition dynamics under depleting resources when predicting how eukaryotic ectotherms will respond to climatic warming.
Date Acceptance
2021-12-30
Citation
Communications Biology
ISSN
2399-3642
Publisher
Nature Research
Journal / Book Title
Communications Biology
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©2022 The Author(s) Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons
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indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the
article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory
regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from
the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/.
Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing,
adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give
appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative
Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party
material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless
indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the
article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory
regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from
the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/.
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